Nitin Kumar, Appnomic Systems Inc. CEO: ‘Our Product is Unique, it is about Foresight, not just Insight’

“We have multiple patents enabling self-healing, transaction shaping, and other foresight-oriented techniques optimizing capacity, service levels, costs and performance.”

Enterprises and born in the cloud companies need IT specialists, making up the company’s core and support infrastructure and operations. One of their main concerns is developing digital products and solutions for their customers, enabling them to carry out their operations in an efficient and effective manner. In the digital economy, the need is not just about fixing problems but identifying the problems before they occur and come up with intelligent, foresight-oriented solutions for a company’s current and future business needs. They aim to boost productivity and efficiency, creating higher earnings and exceptional customer experience.

Considering the aforementioned, we are thrilled to present Appnomic Systems Inc.

Appnomic provides artificial intelligence powered software products. The company offers autonomous information technology through self-healing for its customers. Appnomic Systems is headquartered in the Silicon Valley, United States with a global customer footprint.

In Conversation with Nitin Kumar, Appnomic Systems Inc. CEO

How was Appnomic created?

Our founder Paddy Padmanabhan started the company using his knowledge of architecting a core banking solution and battling performance issues plaguing client applications. In most cases, the issues were not code related but severe non-code related performance issues. Finding the root cause was a cumbersome task involving elimination or seeking the cause and effect relationship between overall usage load and system behavior. On the lookout for a way to quickly solve the problem and provide a lasting solution, he found that he could potentially replicate the actions and decision-making criteria into a learning system taking cognitive actions, preventing problems from occurring. These were the origins of Appnomic leading to the development of the industry’s first AI implementation in Application Performance. This was at a time when Machine Learning was not commonplace and many of the standard libraries were not available, it took a lot of intense effort to create the initial codebase and functionality per Paddy.

What kind of challenges did you face in the initial years?

In initial years, our primary challenge was staying focused on what matters most, and not sacrifice long term value creation by short term quick wins. Every software company has the resource challenges; creating features that customers request vs. staying on an innovation trajectory for building the product of the future. We tried to balance both, we treated every feature request as an opportunity to understand the business problems and create a solution. If we took every feature request, we would probably become like one of the many other monitoring tools, instead of creating a product that defines a new category. Today, the challenge is the messaging in the market which is very cluttered with a lot of companies positioning

them selves as AI Ops with very similar messaging, even though many of them only address AI Ops partially. Our complete strategic pivot to self-healing will bring in clarity to our customers and partners.

“Earning trust and respect of customers all around the world is through consistent focus on delivering high quality in all of our actions.” How do you interpret this statement?

Customers buy based on trust, credibility and product promise which is why we have ingrained what we preach into our culture and operate the same way with customers, partners, investors and employees. Staying focused on our customers’ success, staying close to their business and maintaining a product roadmap addressing our customers’ challenges is key.Delivering products creating value is our simple and humble recipe towards earning trust, respect and credibility.

If you must list five factors that have been/are the biggest asset to your organization, what would they be and why?

The way we think about it is through an analogy. Our engineering function builds the runway, product management assembles the plane, our go-to-market teams fly the plane, our professional services focus on landing the plane well, and management/support functions provide the governance and guidance like air traffic control does. These five pillars are critical to us; our biggest assets are our people, our technology, our patents, our culture and our unique ability to bring all this together so that the passengers (our customers) can maximize benefit from what we do.

What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

We help our customers to achieve their objectives, we look at issues through their lens. Referrals are one of our main sources of new business because our customers win with us. The robustness and ease of using our software adds to this. Our product is unique, when it comes to the self-healing capabilities for the enterprise; we are the only game in town at any scale. We have multiple patents enabling self-healing, transaction shaping, and other techniques which optimize capacity, service levels, costs and enhance performance. We operate with integrity and have delivered the promise of our product, taking it to the next level with each new release.

How do you and your company contribute to the global IT platform and society at large?

Appnomic’s place as an enabler of self-healing enterprise is unparalleled, it is based on the machine learning algorithms that we have built over many years. The IT Operations market has evolved over the last 10 years in a variety of ways. First-generation tools focused on network monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, database monitoring, and application monitoring. Wave two brought intelligence and insight based on big data. The third wave, which we refer to as AIOps, has evolved in a myriad of ways. From metrics to logs to reporting to performance and beyond, there are numerous ways to look at it. We believe that now we are in generation four where we’re seeing increasingly complex APIs, interfaces, external innovation, and R&D that’s being driven by outside partnerships and ecosystems. The fourth-generation complexities cannot be addressed by tools and software focused on insights only, the journey from insight to foresight is what Appnomic addresses through creation of self-healing capabilities.

“Our engineering function builds the runway, product management assembles the plane, our go-to-market teams fly the plane, our professional services focus on landing the plane well, and management/support functions provide the governance and guidance like air traffic control does.”